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New platform Astrolabs isn’t just another mentorship network.
Sprung from the minds of ex-Namshi founders Louis Lebbos and
Muhammed Mekki, the education initiative focuses on helping
entrepreneurs study the basic elements of launching a startup with
local workshops.

“We were originally thinking about how to fill the gap in the
regional [entrepreneurial] ecosystem,” says Lebbos. The idea is to
create “super concrete actionable modules” involving their content
partners Google, PayPal, and Qualcomm, that “guide entrepreneurs in
fields like conversions, marketing, funding, team building and
others.”

While at Namshi, Lebbos and Mekki often
mentioned their dedication to training their own staff and
educating the ecosystem, this past weekend, they put the model into
effect for the first time, launching a three-day workshop,
supported by Google for Entepreneurs, on “Scaling Online Startups”
(SOS).

More than 20 leading entrepreneurs gathered at the Google campus in
Dubai each day to tackle day-to-day issues in interactive
discussions about customer and investor relations, marketing
investments, operations, conversions optimization, and effective
social media approaches, as they lounged on colorful couches.

With mentors including Mohammad Gawdat of Google, Ihsan Jawad of
Zawya, Elias Ghanem of Paypal, and Christopher M. Schroeder, a
U.S.-based venture investor and member of Wamda’s Board, who joined
via Google Hangout, attending startups received a full dose of
advice. "I'm going away with a crazy to-do list," said Shant
Oknayan, one of the participants and founder of Glambox, a start-up that gives women a chance
to try, learn and buy the latest in beauty products.

In Google’s cozy environment that weekend, participants opened up
candidly with each other, sharing the highs and lows of their
experience and the knowledge they gained throughout their start-ups
journeys.

“It has been truly useful for us. The last memorable thing we’ve
been to was Celebration of Entrepreneurship, which was multiple
times the budget of this,” says Ravi Bhusari, co-founder of
Duplays, a startup connecting players to casual sports games, to
make communities healthier, more social and more connected. “Since
then, none of the workshops we’ve attended have been as effective
in terms of learning as SOS was.”

Entrepreneurs are doing a lot of things right, yet it the things
that go wrong can be quite simple, says Ghazwan Hamdan from
Restronaut, a new startup that gathers like-minded people over
dinners. Those pitfalls are what he found SOS addressing
professionally.

The details are what helped the most, said Kunal Kapoor of
TheLuxuryCloset.com. “I’m thankful to everyone who shared the small
details; it makes me more confident. I really want to go and
scale!”

Elias Ghanem, the General Manager of PayPal in the Middle East and
North Africa, was also impressed by the honest exchanges that took
place during the workshop. “What the participants done the last two
days was share and share,” he says. “If each one of us shared 10
things that need to be done to launch a startup in their field,
imagine the outcome.”

For Schroeder, who just wrote Startup Rising, the first book on startups
in the Arab world, the enthusiasm was palpable. "You could
feel the energy come through Google Talk," he said. "Entrepreneurs
and ecosystem builders not only asked good questions, but as often
they answered each other. I learned as much listening to them as
anything I had to say."

The community hopes to continue the momentum; all of the
participants showed interest in regrouping in a couple of month to
measure their progress on specific to-dos. On the spot, the
Astrolabs team set a plan to hold regular follow-up sessions and go
deeper into specific topics, says Lebbos. Next up, they’ll be
bringing the platform to Beirut, Cairo, Riyadh.

Shaimaa El Nazer is an Egyptian Freelance writer and a Media & Marketing specialist; she holds a bachelor degree in Political Sciences from Cairo University and works closely with social businesses and initiatives of social entrepreneurs in different Arab countries. You can find her on Twitter @shaima2ahmedor visit her blog.